As for games, I wanted to add a comment to my post about how I was mostly thinking about mid 80s-early 90s games, but Hacker News seems to have some restrictions keeping new users and throwaways from editing posts. Many European games from this time stood out to me as compromising gameplay at the expense of their animation. In contrast, many of the 90s and early 2000s Western mascot platformer games, as you mentioned, did great jobs of working charismatic, fluid animation into the medium. Crash Bandicoot in particular is notable for being one of the few games to use per-vertex animation; for each key frame of animation, the vertices that made up Crash were placed manually, giving the artists an unprecedented degree of control.
Since then, sadly, most Western AAA devs have tended overwhelmingly towards more "realistic" art styles that make heavy use of inverse kinematics-driven procedural animation for gameplay, and motion capture for cutscenes, leaving the animators much less room for expression.
Regardless, my intent was not to comment on Western animation as a whole, but (bringing it all back to the original commenter's remark about mobile games being sparsely animated) simply state that sparse animation doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, there's an entire school of animation built around it.
Anyway, thanks again for replying, and I'll be sure to check your suggestions out.
The idea of "pencil mileage" works both ways; really thinking about that helped me be able to finally actually enjoy some Japanese stuff.
There is also a strong tradition of Western limited animation; it actually started as the artistic cutting edge with the work of UPA (Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot). Even Disney played win that domain with stuff like Pigs Is Pigs or Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom.
But then in the 60s, TV came along, and Joe Hanna and William Barbera's sweet gig doing beautifully animated Tom & Jerry shorts was gone; they started doing super-simplified cartoons that were carried largely by the voice talent. This got worse in the 70s and 80s, with tons of terrible toy-based cartoons done on the smallest budget possible (He-Man! GI Joe!). "Limited animation" is a dirty word to an entire generation of American animators.
Or at least it was until John K's "Ren & Stimpy" hit the cable networks, and inspired a new generation of animators. Who're busy making a lot of the TV stuff of today.
(But honestly I think that deep in the heart of every Western animator, there is a grey-toned Fleischer character bopping up and down in time to their heartbeat. Their hallucinatory version of Snow White - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg - is a good example.)
Crash and Spyro are great examples of what can be done when a 2D animator's mindset is applied to 3D games! It carries on nicely from all the gorgeous 2D work on games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim. I would love to see people come back to that mindset in video games. Guilty Gear Xrd is the first ray of light in the clunkily-puppeted darkness in a long time.
I was thoroughly impressed Knights of Sidionia on Netflix, and though it can match some feature animation, it is still far from Ghibli/Disney. And it isn't even 2D!
The other day someone posted a gallery from Ghost in the Shell on Reddit and I thought "When was the last time we saw art like this on the big screen?"
Most Western animation has historically been done at 12fps ("on twos"); you go to 24fps for very fast motion or stuff you want to be super-smooth. This holds even in big-budget 2D theatrical features[1]. You will also find no small amount of super-stylized motion - dig up "The Dover Boys" (dir. Chuck Jones), commonly cited as the first cartoon to experiment with the smears, multiple images, and other crazy stylizations of motion. Single-frame your way through that someday; it's full of amazing semi-abstract images.
(First in the US, at least; there may have been people in the East playing with this as well, but there was very little cross-pollination at this time.)
The big difference between the Western and Eastern animation traditions, in my mind, comes from different decisions in how to best allocate "pencil mileage". You have a budget of X number of miles of lines drawn by your animators for each project; how do you spend it? Westerners generally pursued "the illusion of life", favoring really fluid and subtle motion over a huge number of drawings. This meant that very few single drawings could be very complicated. Easterners, on the other hand, gravitated towards complicated character designs. You might spend four or five times as much effort drawing a single frame. This meant that very few motions could be fluid.
Fluidity of motion × character design complexity = pencil mileage. Pencil mileage is fixed by your budget. Which one of those do you want to emphasize? You can't have both unless your budget is amazing. (This is also why animated commercials can have both; they can cost more per second than some features.)
To eyes trained in one tradition, the other one looks like crap. Why is this Eastern cartoon barely more than a slide show half the time? Why is this Western cartoon full of such simplified designs? Personally, it took me many years to learn how to appreciate Eastern animation.
(Also it is worth noting that most lovingly-animated Western games quickly converged on quickly popping into a motion as a result of a control input, with exaggerated settling into the new pose - look at Crash Bandicoot, Earthworm Jim, or Aladdin.)
I am rambling. Mostly I just wanted to mention that my experience of the Western tradition (including years of single-stepping cartoons) is largely on twos, with occasional bursts of ones.
[1] except for anything Richard Williams directed because he is kind of a total obsessive who would wander around the studio late at night and inbetween stuff onto ones that maybe should have never been on ones. See 'Raggedy Ann and Andy' for instance. Or if you want to actually see a decent movie hunt up the Recobbled Cut of 'The Thief and the Cobbler' because RA&A is pretty much 80 minutes of pure nightmare fuel.